Cuomo aide’s trial kicks off with a portrait of the defendant as a scumbag.

A former top aide to Gov. Cuomo was portrayed Tuesday as a money-grubbing crook who parlayed his position of power to pocket more than $300,000 in bribes from opportunistic businessmen who were “more than happy to buy him.” During opening statements at Joseph Percoco’s corruption trial, Manhattan federal prosecutor Robert Boone dramatically pointed his finger...

Time: 14:44&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Date: 23.01.2018

During opening statements at Joseph Percoco’s corruption trial, Manhattan federal prosecutor Robert Boone dramatically pointed his finger at him while describing the extent of Percoco’s influence in Albany.

“Everyone in state government knew who Joseph Percoco was. He was the governor’s right-hand man. Wherever the governor went, he went,” Boone said.
“Getting a call from Percoco was like getting a call from the governor himself.”

But in a case of what Boone called “corruption, the old fashioned kind,” he said Percoco exploited his longstanding ties to Cuomo “to sell the most valuable thing he owned — his job.”

“Why did Percoco choose to take money, choose to corrupt the office of the governor?” Boone asked jurors.

“The answer is greed.”

Percoco is accused of personally taking $35,000 in bribes, and about $290,000 more in the form of a “low-show job” arranged for his wife, Lisa.

Boone also said Percoco’s three co-defendants — the president and general counsel of a Syracuse development firm, and a former exec at a Maryland-based power company — “needed Percoco because each had companies that had business before the state.”

“Percoco had the authority and the ability to influence those things,” Boone said.

But the joke fell flat in the packed courtroom, and didn’t even elicit a chuckle from the seven-woman, five-man jury.

Bohrer described Percoco as someone who “had a passion for public service from the age of 19, spending his entire adult life pursuing public service.”

He also said any money Percoco got from the defendants was received “in good faith” and “for work that was legitimately done.”

“Joe Percoco is a human being, he is not perfect, he made mistakes, but those are not mistakes that amount to a criminal offense,” he said.

Bohrer also attacked the feds’s star witness, former Cuomo aide-turned-lobbyist Todd Howe, repeatedly calling him “Todd Ransom Howe” and describing him as “a guy with less than zero interest in the truth.”

Following a “reversal of fortune in his life,” Howe resorted to “stealing, embezzling, defrauding, lying,” Bohrer said.

And when Howe was “confronted with evidence of this” by the feds, Bohrer said, he “realized his only way out was to point his accusing finger to Joe Percoco.”